Kepler's Mission

Kepler's mission is to answer a question that's long puzzled astronomers.... is Earth the only habitable planet in our Galaxy?
and ....
Are there other planets like ours out there in the Milky Way?
The Kepler Space Telescope, centerpiece of the Kepler Mission, may help answer that question.

Ok, so before we start going into what the Kepler Mission has come up with, maybe we should go into a little bit of history as to who Kepler ...the real Kepler was!

Johannes Kepler was a Greman Mathemathician, Astronomer & Astrologer- a real genius of his day. Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571. He is best known for his laws of Planetary motion which were codified by later Astronomers and provided the foundation for Issac Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation. Kepler lived in an era where there was no clear distinction between Astronomy & Astrology.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, its host star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form. The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. 15 of them are between Earth and Neptune in size, and further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun. "Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."

So, Einstein may have been right after all
there really is a repulsive form of Gravity in space. Einstein first conceived of the notion of a repulsive force in space in his attempt to balance the Universe against the inward pull of its own Gravity, which he thought would ultimately cause the Universe to implode.

His "Cosmological Constant" to represent the possibility that even empty space has energy and couples to Gravity. Like other astronomers of the time, he thought that the Universe was static and so proposed there was a repulsive force from space that kept the Universe in balance.
Einstein discarded his own findings in 1929, when Edwin Hubble found through his research that the Universe was expanding and not static. Today, new data from Hubble may well prove Einstein was on the right track.
It was Dr Adam Riess and the members of the High-z Supernova Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project who used the ground-based telescopes and Hubble to detect the acceleration of the expansion of space from observations of distant supernovae.

Dark Matter

Then there is another unknown called Dark Matter. All the Stars, Galaxies, dust etc that are in the Universe accounts for only 10% of the Universe's mass. This visible stuff is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons and is called ordinary matter. Scientists call ordinary matter 'baryonic matter' because protons and neutrons are subatomic particles called baryons.
The other 90% of the Universe's mass is 'Dark Matter' because it is at hidden and unseen and likely surrounds almost every Galaxy in the known Universe.

Black Holes

Where would Space Fiction be without the Black Hole?
The brilliantly named 'event horizon' added even more mystery to the space movie/TV phenomenon.
But what are Black Holes really?
Here is my incredibly brief explanation:

Black Holes are astronomical objects predicted by Einstein's general relativity. It was thought that due to their strong gravitational effects, space and time are distorted within them, so much so that any matter or even light are imprisoned inside.
The possibility that Stars could collapse to form Black Holes was first theoretically "discovered" in 1939 by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, who were manipulating the equations of Einstein's general relativity. The first Black Hole believed to be discovered in the physical world, as opposed to the mathematical world of pencil and paper, was Cygnus X-1, about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Cygnus X-1 was found in 1970. Since then, dozens of Black Hole candidates have been identified. Many astronomers and astrophysicists believe that massive Black Holes, with sizes up to 10 million times that of our Sun, inhabit the centers of energetic Galaxies and Quasars and are responsible for their enormous energy release. Ironically, Einstein himself did not believe in the existence of Black Holes, even though they were predicted by his theory.
In 1974 the British physicist, Stephen Hawking, showed theoretically that Black Holes actually do emit light and particles from its surface, which consequently makes the Black Hole shrink little by little.
Black Holes appear to be intimately connected with the formation of massive spherical bulges in the center of Galaxies. Astronomers have found a direct relationship between the mass of the Black Hole in a Galaxy and the mass of its central bulge. However, the jury is still out on whether small Galaxies contain smaller Black Holes, and their discovery may lead to new insights about the impact of Black Holes on Galaxy formation.

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